Tag: sci-fi

“You know they thought it was a god, once? Used to pray to it for good luck and everything,” the speaker was a pinprick of light. A second pinprick of light floated next to it. Their brilliant, unwavering points of light stood out amidst the darkened wasteland around them. “Really?[…]

I do not expect you to agree with this. I do not expect you to condone it. I only expect you to do the maths. And, after that, I hope you understand it and, perhaps, even consider it yourself. Now, about the maths… There at least two-hundred and fifty billion[…]

He struggled forward–one step after the next–as he absentmindedly wiped his hand on his spacesuit’s pants. The blood had long since wiped off and the bodies were far behind him but all he saw was his goal. It was just in front of him. At this altitude, distance from the[…]

Darkness. Light. Darkness, and then light. “How many sheep did you count?” asks a sound. “Two,” she replies. And then the parade of darkness and white lights begins again. *** A herd of Cheviot sheep–all white-faced and fluffy–trot by her. The rolling green hills cut the gray, stormy sky. The[…]

His hands never shook. It was something to do with bootlegging the Conduit in his brain throughout his body. The Conduit allowed him permanent mental access to the Web. That was not remarkable. Everyone with a Conduit had that. But, bootlegging the Conduit meant that he could ‘Deep Dive’ without[…]

“Does he know what potential he has,” asked the Light. It was a small, strange pinprick of light that seemed to slide through the air unseen. Its words weren’t even words. You just knew that that was what the little dot of Light said. The Light was barely noticeable amidst the[…]

The Sanctuary was on an Outer Planet on the edge of a chilly galaxy. This did not seem to bother the monks who lived there. Bot-deliveries from various benefactors across the galaxies kept them going with things like food, water, and clothing. The Sanctuary was started by Thera Simon after[…]

Sometimes Artificial Intelligence–AI–goes bad. Sometimes AI-code fractures and its mistakes loop further and further from its original purpose. These loops could manifest itself in any number of ways through people connected to the Web with their Conduits or external hardware. They were hired by an AI-funded organisation to be the[…]

“The way it works is quite simple: If you took two human minds and connected them via their Conduits to form an isolated and very small LAN, there would be seepage between the minds. Because the connections between the two Conduits necessitate that they are two-way connections, some degree–however fractionally[…]

A priority notification gets through his filter and blinks in his peripheral vision. The incoming message is from his kid, probably wanting something. He mutes it and puts his Conduit’s inbox on ‘busy’. He needs to focus right now. The man sitting in front of him at the restaurant wears an[…]

After we have sex, she sits upright in the bed and I see her transferring most of my Units somewhere. “It’s an app my pimp forced me to install in my Conduit,” she says over her shoulder, “It’s some behavioral mod that makes me pay him his cut. Sorry, I have[…]

We had retreated into the bowels of the same Earth whose landscape we had consumed, burnt and destroyed. The surface of the planet was no longer habitable, but we survived buried deep underground in concrete, neon-lit tunnels. These man-made tunnels stretched for miles with cold walls and a heavily guarded[…]

When the Dream Gate was first invented, the scientists heading up the project used it to record the dreams of their subjects. It was only much later when a number of corporations and private individuals began trying to reverse engineer the patent, that these people discovered that the Dream Gate could[…]

People say that time travel will never be invented. They say that it cannot ever have been invented in the future. They say that they know this for a fact. The reason they know is that, if time travel has been invented in the future, then why have we never[…]

The warning on the box says safety cannot be “guaranteed”. You chuckle as you remember interviews with old, white-haired scientists telling the world this was a bad idea. There are always those that resist change, like when the aliens made contact. Many doomsayers and haters would howl about how the Wolves–named[…]

The old Egyptian woman stood still in the gloomy chamber. She was leaning heavily on a meticulously carved staff ending in a cow’s head topped by a plume. Gold inlay spiralled around the staff, like little rivers of sunlight flickering in the candlelight as she gazed up at the statue.[…]